Thinking inside the box at school

There are a whole lot of us out here who got into trouble for talking in class. There are a whole lot of us who got put into boxes well after school was over — we call them cubicles.

However, the one thing that saved most of us from becoming little misfits was the fact that we didn’t act out for very long before our parents found out. Not many of us acted out for an entire month before there was a parent-teacher conference that quickly sorted out our little attitudes.

“The key to finding successful strategies is good communication between school and home,” Highland School Superintendent Mike Sutton said.

So why, then, did a month go by before Melody Haller found out her 8-year-old was spending his days at Alhambra Elementary behind a cardboard partition for talking in class? She only found out after another student told his parents about the “boy in a box.”

School is not only a place where children learn the Three Rs. It is a place where they learn society’s rules of behavior and the benefits of cooperation, discipline and order that are essential to most work environments.

Those lessons are most effective when parents are on board and informed. Without discussing the specific case, Sutton made it pretty clear the staff at Alhambra Elementary failed on that front.

“I believe the most notable takeaway was that of communication with parents,” he said.

Not too hard to imagine the outcome had that old lesson been the starting place instead of the conclusion.

This story was originally published March 15, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Thinking inside the box at school."